Wiggle, the online sportswear and equipment retailer, is expanding the number of payment methods that it accepts via the Ogone Collect platform as part of its international expansion.

The retailer is planning to add more local payment methods, such as online payment method Klarna, which is becoming increasingly popular in Germany, as it finds that giving customers a wider range of payment options leads to higher sales. Today, 60 percent of its new customers come from outside the UK.

"We track different stages of the conversion funnel, from when they enter the site to the [order] confirmation," said Justin Lodge, European territory manager for Wiggle.

"We find that when we put additional local payments live, there is a reduction in exits on that page."

Wiggle started using the technology from Ogone, a global online payment service provider, in 2010, initially to further growth in the Netherlands. Ogone supports over 100 payment methods in over 70 countries, but Wiggle will only adopt a proportion of these, depending on how useful they are to the business.

The payment page is hosted externally by Ogone, which means that customers are taken outside of the Wiggle website when they are ready to pay for purchases.

According to Lodge, giving international customers familiar payment options is key to driving sales.

"Trust is a real issue and showing the logos of local payment options that customers are comfortable with and delivery companies they trust is vital," he said.

"We know that if we don't offer different payment methods the conversation rates would be lower."

The expansion of payment options is part of a "suite of enhancements" that Wiggle is making to its websites. It has 13 top-level domains in 11 languages, most of which have been translated into the local languages.

"We see a strong correlation between the level of translation and the level of conversion," Lodge said.

The Wiggle website is a custom.net application that the retailer built in-house. Its mobile site has also been built by Wiggle developers. The retailer is planning to re-platform its website, though no decisions have been made about what this will involve, as yet.

In a recent interview, the retailer revealed that it had completed two of the biggest IT projects in the 13-year history of the company, including a new carrier management system for its logistics and a warehouse management system that eradicated a large amount of paper processes.